The long-suppressed CIA Inspector General’s report on interrogations will be released tomorrow but Newsweek has a preview:
A long-suppressed report by the Central Intelligence Agency’s inspector general to be released next week reveals that CIA interrogators staged mock executions as part of the agency’s post-9/11 program to detain and question terror suspects, NEWSWEEK has learned.
According to two sources—one who has read a draft of the paper and one who was briefed on it—the report describes how one detainee, suspected USS Cole bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was threatened with a gun and a power drill during the course of CIA interrogation. According to the sources, who like others quoted in this article asked not to be named while discussing sensitive information, Nashiri’s interrogators brandished the gun in an effort to convince him that he was going to be shot. Interrogators also turned on a power drill and held it near him. “The purpose was to scare him into giving [information] up,” said one of the sources. A federal law banning the use of torture expressly forbids threatening a detainee with “imminent death.”
Now, if we can’t define the people responsible for this as criminals and put them in jail then we are no better than some penny-ante dictatorship. And if the people responsible are Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush, so be it. How many times did they tell us that Saddam Hussein used power drills on people?
